Monday, May 17, 2010

But Which Toe?

The New York Times on What it All Means; Existence:

In a mathematically perfect universe, we would be less than dead; we would never have existed. According to the basic precepts of Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics, equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been created in the Big Bang and then immediately annihilated each other in a blaze of lethal energy, leaving a big fat goose egg with which to make to make stars, galaxies and us. And yet we exist, and physicists (among others) would dearly like to know why.

So the miniature universe which physicists have managed to create for a tiny moment inside the CERN Hadron and other particle accelerators, went from being neutral to being about 1 percent more matter than antimatter, on some occasions...

Joe Lykken, a theorist at Fermilab, said, “So I would not say that this announcement is the equivalent of seeing the face of God, but it might turn out to be the toe of God.”